IAPRI members emphasize to the media the importance of packaging education

IAPRI members Michigan State University (MSU) School of Packaging, USA, and the University of Twente, the Netherlands, have been featured in an article on the online platform PackagingInsights discussing the importance of specialised packaging education.
 
The article explored whether there was a discrepancy between the growing importance of packaging, not least from the perspective of sustainability, and the availability of specialised packaging education. Talking about the era when MSU’s School of Packaging was founded (1952), director Susan Selke commented: “The benefits of the highly interdisciplinary and applied perspective that education in packaging offers was often not appreciated.”
 
MSU was the only university outside China where students could study for a PhD which is officially designated ‘in packaging’, she added, but that posed challenges of its own in terms of recruiting faculty.
 
At the opposite end of the spectrum, time-wise, the University of Twente, the Netherlands, which hosted this year’s IAPRI Symposium in June, sent the first graduate from its Packaging Design and Management course out into industry only in 2007. Discussing its recruitment record since then, Roland ten Klooster said: “From the almost 90 graduates, around 50 work in the field of packaging, and they are the first packaging engineers, technologists and designers with a packaging degree.”
 
He went on to suggest that one of the reasons why businesses did not have answers to give on plastics-related issues, and took some misguided decisions, was the lack of team members with specialist university-level packaging education.
 
The article is here: https://www.packaginginsights.com/news/packaging-education-specialized-degrees-can-help-solve-sustainability-challenges-and-more-experts-say.html